According to the study, scientists discovered in the Amazon rainforest a huge network of densely populated cities 2,500 years old, in which a previously unknown agrarian civilization lived, reports AFP.

The site, which covers an area of ​​more than 1,000 square kilometers in the Upano Valley in Ecuador at the foot of the Andes, includes about 20 towns connected by roads.

This is urban planning on a scale never seen before for such an early period in the Amazon. “This is not just a village, but an entire landscape domesticated by man,” Stéphane Rostain, director of research at CNRS (France’s largest public research organization) and lead author of the study published this week, told AFP. Science magazine.

25 years ago, this French archaeologist discovered the first traces of this civilization called “Upano” during excavations on the ground and found several hundred mounds of earth.

In 2015, a company authorized by the Ecuadorian Heritage Authority decided to fly over the region using a Lidar (Laser Image Detection and Ranging), a small laser remote sensing device that is carried on board an aircraft and allows it to scan the ground passing through the leaves of trees in a thick Amazon forest.

“By removing the vegetation carpet, you can restore the true shape of the soil over these hundreds of square kilometers, something that could not be achieved on the ground,” explained Stephen Rostein.

Just like in New York

The resulting images revealed more than 6,000 barrows, rectangular platforms of earth that served as foundations for the dwellings to protect them from the wet ground.

“I did not expect something so spectacular. For an archaeologist, this is a real scientific El Dorado,” said the French researcher.

The first platforms were built between 500 BC. and 300-600 AD, thus covering the period of the Roman Empire.

Other pre-Hispanic villages have been excavated in the Amazon, but they are later, dating to 500 AD. and 1500 AD But they were not so great.

What is still more remarkable is that the newly discovered cities are intersected by great, deep, straight streets, built at right angles — “like New York,” says the French archaeologist — that connect the localities with each other. According to the same expert, for commercial, but also for ceremonial purposes.

Some cities had a large central avenue, similar to the one at the Teotihuacan archaeological site in Mexico, to bring local residents together. These settlements were “densely populated”, with “several thousand inhabitants” – a statistical study is currently being conducted to obtain a more accurate estimate.

A nomadic “stratified” society

Mounds with a height of 8-10 meters testify to the construction of collective premises for rituals or holidays, rather than houses.

The small fields also show that it was an agrarian society that “used the smallest empty space to give it fruit,” analyzes a researcher who works at the Laboratory of Archeology of the Americas at the CNRS.

While excavating dwellings, he has already unearthed many household remains: seeds, grinding stones, tools, ceramic jars from which beer is drunk from corn.

“We’re not talking about a nomadic society, we’re talking about a stratified society, probably with authorities and engineers to draw the roads,” summarized Stephen Rosstein.

In his view, this discovery proves that “Amazonia had not only archaic indigenous hunter-gatherers, but also a complex urban population,” while “a certain Western arrogance tends to limit the civilization of forest peoples to a state of wilderness.”

“It is time to revise this demeaning view of the Amazon,” added the French archaeologist. (Agerpress)